Hidden Gods

by Anthony Masters

  ‘Been writing?’

  ‘Dictating.’ Strangely the word was unslurred, but it sounded like a careless comment uttered by a weary businessman.

  ‘Will you come to Tiderace with me?’

  ‘Bucket and spade, Dad. Let’s hold back the sea.’ He was still articulate.

  ‘You bet.’ Hugo at last felt encouraged, although he did not have the faintest idea why.

  The hospital gave permission for Hugo to take his son to Tiderace. Lucy was visibly shocked and tried to demur, but they were both told that Brent had reached such a low state that a carefully supervised and structured trip back to an old childhood haunt might do him some good, or at least, they implied, it couldn’t do any harm.

  Their decision, Hugo later noticed, seemed to further embitter Lucy, and although she was attentive to his physical needs, the battery of pills he still took and his unsteady walk, she seemed as far apart from him as when he had been away. But there was one relief: he had not hallucinated for days now and had not seen Dr Lex for a week. He did not intend to see him again; Hugo felt that he was off the hook.

  The expedition to Tiderace took place a week later. Hugo hired a small but sturdy motor cruiser and Lucy unenthusiastically agreed to accompany them. Brent arrived, docile, seemingly uninvolved, wearing a track suit that was too large and an anorak that was too small. He was accompanied by Paxton, whose jarring cheerfulness irritated everyone.

  The morning was blustery with a brilliant blue sky flecked with racing clouds, and the Dolphin thumped flatly through the wave crests with Hugo at the wheel, heading towards the island which was about four miles offshore.

  Brent sat out on deck in a white canvas chair, watched over anxiously by Paxton who genially made observations about sea and sky which obviously annoyed him intensely. Lucy brewed coffee in the cabin and served it with difficulty in the swell, returning immediately to prepare lunch.

  She’s happy to withdraw, Hugo thought, not just from Brent and Paxton but me as well. What am I going to do if she won’t have me back, he wondered with a sudden attack of panic. It was the first time that he had allowed himself to seriously consider life without Lucy. He had loved her, still loved her; or was he in love with the permanence and security of her, the fact that he had assumed she would always be waiting for him? Right now, she seemed remarkably impermanent.

  Hugo glanced up at the reddish, sinewy rock. They were approaching the island now and the bright sunlight picked out its rugged shores in silvery detail. He stared at Tiderace curiously, knowing what love and happiness and innocence and self-containment it had held for them, but not really remembering its physical features, so multi-layered had he become.

  He looked across at Brent and felt a pang of grief. As he watched him, his son swung round and his gaze met his father’s. Hugo flinched as the pale blue eyes locked into his. He turned away, feeling almost as afraid of Brent as he had been of the young intruder in his hotel bedroom. Then, to his intense amazement, Hugo saw the pyramid.

  His head reeling, Hugo turned back to his son, and was immediately aware that he was watching the cliffs too. They stared at it in silence, only the low throbbing of the engine breaking the stillness, but as they approached the coast the pyramid suddenly disappeared.

  They rowed into the cove in the tender, Brent sitting bolt upright, a bizarre figure but not without a strange dignity. Tiderace looked smaller than ever, bare rock, jagged cliffs, a tiny summit and an undulating path to a plateau full of scrubby foliage. The sea had quietened a litde but still pounded at the rocks, sending spray flying up in great spumes.

  ‘Magnificent,’ said Paxton, looking robust but chilled as some of the spray came aboard the tender, but Brent did not seem to notice anything now, hardly moving as the boat struck the gravelly beach of the cove. ‘Get any seals here?’ Paxton sounded over-enthusiastic, but his eyes were on Hugo.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucy.

  ‘This is going to be fun.’ He sprang out of the tender.

  ‘It’s good of you to come with us like this,’ said Hugo awkwardly, still dazed by what he had seen. He felt a surge of despair. He was still hallucinating. Would Brent’s presence tell him why? What did they have to share?

  Brent Fitzroy stood on the desolate beach, looking down at the pebbles.

  ‘Brent, darling. Do you remember this place?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I remember coming here.’

  Hugo tentatively put an arm round his son’s shoulders.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Brent.

  ‘You know who I am.’

  ‘Are you my father?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You went away.’ His voice was not accusing, merely matter of fact. Paxton was looking at them all possessively now. Perhaps he’ll write us up for a thesis, thought Hugo.

  ‘I had to earn a living – for all of us.’ He tried to speak as gently as possible, but immediately the words were out he knew he sounded too assertive.

  ‘Do you fancy a scramble, Brent?’ asked Paxton. He sounded slightly threatening. ‘Do you remember how we tackled the cliff path at Foy?’

  Brent shrugged.

  ‘Are we all going?’ Lucy asked grimly.

  ‘I think it would be for the best,’ said Hugo. He looked at his watch. Just after three and the sun was intense. ‘I’ve got a couple of bottles of mineral water in the boat.’

  The climb to the plateau was comparatively easy, but it was much harder to the cliff top and soon the pain in Hugo’s knees was agonizing. Several times he had to stop.

  ‘You shouldn’t have attempted this,’ said Lucy admonishingly.

  ‘I’ve got to.’

  ‘You all right?’ bellowed Paxton, who was further up the rock with Brent, one hand protectively on his arm.

  Hugo took a grip on himself and tried to shut out the shooting pains. Then Brent called and this time he was animated, almost childlike.

  ‘Race you to the top, Dad.’ Brent looked eagerly at his father. There was a light in his eyes and only the ungainly body and institutionalized clothes remained to serve as a reminder that he was a patient. Beside him, Paxton seemed to have suddenly lost his energy.

  ‘Be careful,’ advised Lucy but Hugo’s knees no longer hurt as Brent grabbed his hand.

  ‘Come on, Dad.’

  They climbed on, and as they did so Hugo remembered the times they had shared on Tiderace. In his mind’s eye, he saw Lucy and Brent swimming towards him through the breakers, Brent and himself lighting a driftwood fire on the beach, exploring the rock-pools, making castles on the tiny strip of sandy beach, gathering seaweed, skimming flat stones over the waves. They had been happy then – and he had taken it away, a growing future wrecked by the restless need to move on, not to be known intimately, not to be exposed even by his nearest and dearest. Why had he been so afraid? Why had he swopped so much good for numbing sensation-hunting?

  Then, as they clambered over the final crest, Hugo saw the pyramid again, gaunt against the afternoon sun, and he cried out, shielding his eyes at the reality of it. This time there was no light, a cloudy darkness around its base, but his feet hardly seemed to touch the ground as Brent dragged him on.

  ‘Dad – can we camp on the island for a fortnight? The three of us.’

  ‘That’s what we used to do.’ Hugo was panting slightly as they stood side by side.

  ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’

  ‘How did this get here?’ Hugo still couldn’t believe what he saw, but when he touched the light grey stone, it felt real enough. He looked up at the walls, seeing hieroglyphs, carvings of animals, and a huge central G. ‘What does that stand for?’ he asked, as if he was inquiring about a butterfly or a moth that the youthful Brent was showing him.

  ‘Giza.’ His voice seemed distant. ‘The Great Pyramid, a survivor of the Flood, placed at the centre of the earth.’

  Hugo was terribly afraid now; the walls seemed to cast a longer, darker and colder shadow – the shadow of madn
ess.

  ‘The space portal is going to open soon, Dad. The frequency of the earth – it’s changing.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about. What’s going on?’

  Aertex shirts and corduroy shorts. Socks and sandals. So brown, and with a shrimping net. That had been his son. Who was this figure beside him? In a too-small anorak. With a boy’s voice.

  ‘You will.’

  The pyramid shimmered with an incredibly bright light, and then dissolved back into dark rock.

  Brent began to walk towards the edge of the cliffs. ‘I’ve got to be punished,’ he said. ‘I thought they would welcome me. But they know I’m Thoth, know that I let it be destroyed.’

  ‘Wait!’

  He did not reply and Hugo could only hear the sighing of the wind that was mounting again. Brent was very near the edge now, looking down at the boiling sea, but Hugo stood there inert, powerless to help.

  Paxton came from nowhere, grabbing Brent round the waist, hauling him back quickly and efficiently.

  ‘We’ve had our outing,’ he snapped. ‘Let’s go home.’ They left Hugo standing on the rock, inadequate and afraid. He began to shake.

  *

  ‘What happened?’ asked Lucy as they scrambled slowly down to the cove. Paxton was well ahead of them, shepherding his charge back to the tender.

  ‘I saw a pyramid.’

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ she said dismissively and Hugo cringed inwardly. That’s how she used to talk about my ambitions, years ago, he thought, remembering the anger he had felt when she unfailingly dusted his plans down so sensibly, putting each one in its logical place. Change had always been anathema to her, and she subtly resisted anything innovative, or even mildly different.

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’

  Lucy didn’t reply.

  ‘Or would you prefer the theory of mutual hypnosis?’ He barked an angry laugh at her as he almost lost his footing on the steep path. Below, Paxton was helping Brent who stumbled on like an old man, hardly able to place one foot in front of the other.

  The voyage back to the mainland was silent, the powerful motor boat ploughing through a long swell. Brent was below, asleep on a bunk, while Paxton, openly disapproving, played patience. Lucy sat in the cockpit beside Hugo at the helm. They had not spoken since leaving Tiderace and he felt an increasing emptiness between them.

  ‘It was solid,’ he muttered. ‘Absolutely solid.’

  ‘Don’t let’s go into all that again. Can’t you see what a disaster this trip has been? If it hadn’t been for Paxton – ‘

  ‘Dr Hibbs thought it was a good idea.’ Hugo felt like a child caught out in a lie. He should just have admitted hallucinating. But there had been more. Much more.

  ‘Dr Hibbs was wrong. I want him back in the hospital – safe and sound,’ Lucy said distantly. ‘And you must get some rest, too – you’ve overstretched yourself,’ she added perfunctorily, and Hugo knew that what she really wanted to do was to take Brent home, make him a cup of cocoa, put him to bed, slip in a hot-water bottle and cocoon him in sheets and blankets, securing him with an eiderdown. But Hugo knew that even if she could, when she had put out the light and closed the door, their son would open the window of his mind and see pyramids and portals. But where was all this leading?

  Hugo no longer felt afraid as he steered the Dolphin back towards port, and as he looked up at the stars and planets so sharply etched in the clear night sky the words from the tape came back into his mind. ‘We will go to the pyramid – Brent and Philippa and I.’ Who was Philippa?

  Desultory weeks passed while Hugo’s kneecaps finally healed. He spent most of his time walking on the cliff paths thinking about what had happened on Tiderace, trying to impose order and meaning – and failing. Lucy had resumed work and went every day to her office in Falmouth. Without her, the rambling house was arid and he had never been a gardener. Contact with fellow journalists was painful for he felt an old crock, out of the swim, unable to talk about anything else but sickness and rehabilitation. Strangely, Hugo began to feel a strong sense of frustration at the loss of his hallucinations. Originally he had been pleased, thinking he was ‘cured’, but since his experiences on the island he felt a yearning for some kind of corroboration.

  When she came home Lucy clearly tried to be sensitive to his depression, driving him out for meals with old friends he could hardly remember and had nothing in common with, or with new acquaintances that he could not be bothered to get to know. They were all worlds apart from him; Hugo had lived on his wits too long, been in too many tight spots, had too many drinking companions to have any patience with their ordered lives. Giving these new acquaintances no chance to be interesting, he held the floor, becoming the grand old man of anecdote, boring himself as much as them. He saw their frozen smiles and their growing impatience, but he continued to punish them for what he considered was their complacency as much as for their obvious antipathy.

  In his role as a semi-invalid he had not touched alcohol since his hospitalization, but he simulated drinking with endless cups of coffee, tea and fruit juices. The painkillers had seemed to dull the desire for alcohol, and the several courses of antibiotics he had had for infections of his shattered knees did much the same, but as he healed the desire to drink grew until Hugo found himself thinking about alcohol all the time, making the excuse that perhaps with the return of intoxication he would be able to approach the mystery of the pyramid.

  He tried to exhaust himself by walking as much as possible, slumping down afterwards in front of the television, only to find that the ever persistent Lucy had landed him with the Masons for drinks, the Beresfords for a barbecue or Tim and Margaret Jackson for supper. That was the danger point – when he needed a drink the most – so he swopped the buzz of alcohol for the dubious lift of self-invention as his anecdotes became more and more bizarre. Lucy had obviously decided that to criticize Hugo would not be politic and maintained a slightly martyred silence, making them both hyperconscious of the problem.

  Occasionally they went out together on their own, but somehow it only extended their nurse/patient relationship and Hugo soon found these times very hard to bear. Neither discussed the ill-fated trip to Tiderace, and Hugo made no further attempt to tell her about the pyramid.

  They both visited Brent each week. Hugo took care never to go alone for Brent had deteriorated badly and Hugo knew that the hospital put this down to the visit to Tiderace. Their son seemed to have withdrawn even further into some deep place inside and no longer concerned himself with his journal at all. Hetty now waited in vain for dictation while Brent sat alone in the day-room, his partially healed hands hanging at his sides, his head on his chest and his feet crumpled underneath him. Occasionally he would look up and several times he nodded at his parents or drank a cup of tea held in a shaking hand. But there was no more than that, and although his drugs were changed several times he remained much the same. It was if the very essence of him had been drained away.

  ‘Another wasted visit this afternoon,’ said Hugo, as they walked across the sands in the glow of the late evening sun. The sky was dark amber, and the golden line of the tide was beginning to cover the flat, grey expanse.

  ‘Yes?’ Her voice was neutral.

  ‘He just sits there.’

  ‘He had a bad shock.’

  ‘Is that what the doctors say?’ Hugo knew that Lucy had spoken to them yesterday but she had only passed on the barest of details.

  ‘They think he’ll only start his journal again when he feels safe.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure about what?’

  ‘The doctors are such gurus.’

  Lucy clambered over one of the breakwaters and Hugo followed, surprised to find that his knees coped easily with the awkward manoeuvre.

  ‘You think we should ask for a second opinion?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Then what do you think?’ There was an edge to her voice now.<
br />
  ‘Why did he try to kill himself?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s ill. He’s mad.’ For the first time Lucy had stopped being careful and her voice shook with emotion. ‘Hugo – I can’t make it all right for you.’

  ‘Did I ask you to try?’

  ‘We’ve got to talk.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Us.’

  The sun had set and there was only a crimson stain left.

  ‘Can’t you see I’m trying to make a fresh start?’

  She made no response, staring silently out to sea.

  ‘Can’t you help me? You said you would.’

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you, Hugo.’

  He knew what was coming. He could almost see a new uncertainty in the darkening sky. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I didn’t wait for you.’ She half laughed.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There is someone else.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ he said angrily, furious that his suspicions had been correct.

  ‘I wanted to make sure you were strong enough.’

  ‘You can’t do this to me,’ he said self-pityingly.

  ‘Believe me – I don’t want to.’ She was suddenly so much more resolute. It was as if she had hurried across a falling bridge and was talking to him confidently from the other side.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘An estate manager. He’s called Tim.’

  ‘Is that all you’re going to tell me?’

  ‘What else do I need to tell you?’

  ‘And what’s going to happen?’ The last patch of crimson in the sky was swallowed up by darkness.

  ‘I want to be with him.’ Hugo could not see Lucy’s face clearly and her voice barely reached him through the void. ‘His wife is dead. I’d like to live with him. You can have the house.’ The staccato sentences had a dreadful finality. ‘I’m very sorry, Hugo. I loved you for many years after you abandoned us.’

  ‘I never abandoned you – I had a job to do.’

  ‘Left us, then.’ She was prepared to modify the terminology. ‘When I first met Tim it was just friendship. We were both lonely.’